Introduction

In this episode Declan Kiberd reads the closing chapter of his latest book Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Livingpublished by Faber and Faber. Kiberd shows that Ulysses, far from being the epitome of elitism, was always intended as a book for the common people. It was rooted in their experience and offers a humane vision of a decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. Leopold Bloom, the book’s hero, shows the young Stephen Dedalus how he can grow and mature as an artist and as a tolerant, adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the streets of Dublin. Apparently banal, he embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, and in this way offers us a model for living well.

Declan Kiberd

Declan Kiberd is Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin. Among his books are Synge and the Irish Language (Macmillan, 1979), Men and Feminism in Modern Literature (Macmillan,1985), Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Jonathan Cape,1995) Irish Classics (Grants, 2000) and The Irish Writer and the World(Cambridge University Press, 2005). He introduced and editedThe Annotated Students’ Ulysses (1992) in the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics series. Professor Kiberd is a director of the Abbey Theatre. He has been Parnell Fellow at Magdalene College Cambridge, and a visiting professor at Duke University and the Sorbonne.